by Tash Aw
“Consider this, son,” his father continued calmly. “No one might be interested in buying the cinema itself—there are modern cinemas everywhere now. But the land value is tremendous. The cinema can always be torn down.”
“But do we need the money that badly?” Justin repeated.
“It’s the last parcel of land in town that does not have a premium development on it. Sooner or later, it will happen. What if, say, the government makes a compulsory purchase order? They did that with our Pudu land just last month, remember? And we didn’t get the right price for it. It’s much better to act while we can still control the situation.”
“But, Father, this is one of the few remaining heritage buildings in KL. Surely the government can’t destroy it for another office block.”
Sixth Uncle snorted.
“And what about the people who have worked there for forty years? The old Indian jaga was still there the other day. It’s, like, his home.”
“For goodness’ sake,” Sixth Uncle said, “we’re not a damn charity.”
“But—” Justin began to say, and then he stopped, for he knew that the decision had been made.
“We thought that you should be in charge of the site. We have a couple of people interested in buying it, but we are thinking of developing it ourselves too. You need to … explore the options.”
Sixth Uncle looked at Justin as he remained slumped in his chair. “The boy isn’t up to it,” he said. “He doesn’t want to do it. Guess it’s too big a job for a kid.”
Justin’s father said, “He isn’t a child anymore; he’s twenty-six years old. It’s high time he assumes responsibility for important matters.”
“He’ll be okay,” Sixth Uncle replied.
And Justin thought: It was strange that people spoke about him in the third person, as if he did not exist.
What made the situation worse for Justin—what made him feel physically sick—was how he would explain his family’s plans to Yinghui. She had already started to work part-time for a charity set up by friends of theirs, Friends of Old KL, which campaigned to preserve the few remaining historic buildings in KL—the once-grand colonial mansions and the handsome Chinese shophouses that were being bulldozed to make way for the tower blocks that she described as “pathetic phalluses.” Justin had, on several occasions, been present when she and her conservation-minded friends had discussed their work. They’d called people of their parents’ generation “mindless vandals” who had happily deprived future generations of their rightful heritage: Prison would not be an overpunishment for such crimes. He had felt guilty by implication, as if he belonged to that older generation—part of an unfeeling establishment that kicked aside all that stood in their way.
“But there’s a question of practicality,” he had once ventured. “Old buildings aren’t practical. You can’t live in them easily; they’re hard to maintain.”
Yinghui had simply rolled her eyes and said, “You just don’t get it.”
But he had gotten it; he understood perfectly what the position was. For a week or two after the meeting with his father and Sixth Uncle, he avoided Yinghui, feeling as if she would see the guilt imprinted upon him, all those crimes against culture brewing within him. Whenever he came home after work and saw her lounging on the sofa with C.S., he did not stop, as he usually did, to share a Coke and a quick chat with them but headed straight upstairs instead. He decided he would not tell her; she would not know anything until it was too late, when a tower block was standing in place of the New Cathay. He would then vaguely lay the blame on his father, his family, the government—whomever. He would be no more to blame than the whole damn country.
He saw her and C.S. by chance one day at the Nasi Kandar place in Taman Tun. They had been looking at a small shop lot in the area, with a view to starting a business of some kind (she was actually going ahead with it, he thought, feeling slightly alarmed); he had just finished a round of golf with prospective business partners at the golf club nearby.
“Very busy these days?” Yinghui said as she sipped a cold rose syrup.
“Yes, kind of.”
“Wah, I’d like to have a job where playing golf counts as working.”
Justin shrugged.
“Or maybe you were paying homage at the family cemetery?” she continued. “Tell me, how difficult was it to keep hold of the cemetery when you sold the land to develop the golf course?”
“I don’t know. I was a teenager then; I wasn’t involved in any of that.”
“Must be hard selling off all that family land to big government companies. But I’m sure you guys didn’t do too badly out of it.”
Their food arrived. Justin had been hungry, but now he felt too hot and sweaty to eat it; he’d ordered too much, and he didn’t really feel like Nasi Kandar now.
“Explain to me how it works—how you deal with it, emotionally, I mean, when you sell off something that’s been in the family for generations. Is there, like, any sentimentality involved? Or do the billions you get from the sale compensate for the loss? When you go past a shopping mall with KFC and McDonald’s and all that, do you ever think, Wow, that was where my granddad started his first business? Or do you just think, I’d like a Big Mac?”
C.S. looked away, searching for a waiter. “Anyone want another soya bean drink?”
“I don’t know.” Justin shook his head. “I don’t run that side of the business.”
“Liar,” Yinghui said. Her face suddenly flushed; it was a very hot day, and she was sweating. “You are such a fucking two-faced snake. Sitting here in front of us and saying you don’t know anything about it. Hanging out with my friends and saying, Yeah, isn’t it terrible, all this mindless development going on around us, we don’t need it, it’s just to show the West that we are a rich, modern country, we should preserve our soul. And then you turn around and raze everything to the ground. You know what? Fuck you.”
“I have no idea why you are getting so worked up. Why are you suddenly attacking me? Calm down.”
“ ‘I have no idea why you are getting so worked up,’ ” Yinghui mimicked. “So you have no idea what’s going to happen to the New Cathay Movie Theatre? No plans to tear it down and sell the land to the highest bidder? Beautiful piece of land—prime location, isn’t it? Shame it happens to have the first Art Deco building in KL on it. Oh, well, too bad, just destroy it. You are such a ruthless bastard.”
“No one is supposed to know,” Justin said quietly, looking around them to see if anyone was listening. “How did you find out?”
“Luckily not every member of your family is as heartless as you.” As she said this, she reached across and held C.S.’s forearm; her hand rested on his skin, her grip light but firm. With his free arm, C.S. continued to eat, looking intently at his food without meeting Justin’s gaze. “Justin,” Yinghui continued, “you can’t let this happen. Don’t you have any sense of responsibility at all? To your friends? To your history? To … us?”
“But my father … my family—that’s what they want. You know it’s my duty. They need me.”
Yinghui paused for a moment. Her gaze rose slightly toward the ceiling, as if contemplating the infinite replies floating in the ether. She said calmly, “When will you ever be your own man, with your own life?”
As she and C.S. left the restaurant, their food unfinished, neither of them looked at Justin. He stared down at his barely eaten plate of food. Two flies had landed on the piece of sambal chicken next to the pile of rice; they lay unmoving, clinging to the piece of meat and blending in with the bits of charred skin. Yinghui’s words remained in his head, her question seeming increasingly rhetorical the longer he contemplated it. When will you ever be your own man, with your own life? When will you be free? He tried to eat but had lost all appetite. He asked for the food to be packed up in a takeaway bag, but as he walked to his car he thought of the curry seeping into the rice, making it mushy and unpleasant. It would quickly turn rancid in the heat, he thought,
so, without thinking, he flung it into the monsoon drain before driving away.
CASE STUDY:
HUMAN RELATIONS
The following scene takes place outside the Bottega Veneta store at the Golden Eagle shopping mall on Shanxi Bei Lu. I shall describe the situation and leave it up to you to decide how best to resolve it—a small test to see how much you have learned and observed thus far:
Two people, a man and a woman, have just met up for the evening and are idly wandering around the shops, killing time before going to dinner. From a distance, they look typical of a sort of couple that you see quite frequently in certain moneyed venues in Shanghai. He is older than she and obviously wealthy, dressed in a golf shirt, comfortable slacks, and leather loafers with tassels on the front, possibly a foreigner; she is in her twenties, slender, giggly. Sometimes she appears to behave much younger than her age, almost like a teenager; other times she seems harsh. Her eyes can look either watery and soft or firm and cold, like an old auntie who has been through a lot.
They pause in front of the shopwindow, looking at the women’s bags on display—a patchwork of colorful leather. He does not know what to do with his hands; at one point it seems as though he is about to reach out to her, but he does not. Instead, he clasps his hands behind his back; then he puts them in his pockets. He is a touch nervous, it would seem. Maybe they are not yet actually a couple. There is something not quite right about this pair of supposed friends. What exactly is the nature of their human transaction?
The air-conditioning is very strong; it feels cool against the skin and gives her goose pimples on her bare arms. She draws a fine shawl around her shoulders. It is a deep red color that matches her shoes and goes well with her complexion. She makes a joke and laughs coquettishly, looking at him and touching him lightly on the shoulder. Is this an invitation for more intimate contact? Still, his hands remain tucked in his pockets. She laughs once more; it is a sweet, earthy laugh, richer than her delicate looks suggest, even a touch coarse. He nods and now, at last, he puts his hand lightly on her back, resting it on the shawl. She holds the shawl tight, protectively, as if it is very cold. From a distance it might even look as if she were afraid of something. The shawl she is wearing—look carefully. It glistens in the harsh lighting; it is artificially shiny. Perhaps she is afraid that he will guess it is made not from pure pashmina but from a synthetic mixture of nylon and other flammable textiles—the kind of fashion you can buy for 20 kuai on the steps leading down to most subway stations.
She points at a handbag in the window. It is scarlet in color and sits next to other accessories of a similar hue and design. Red is obviously her favorite color. She looks at her companion; he smiles and shakes his head, as if she has just told him something amusing.
Should she:
(a) Drape herself against him and whisper tender words and pout in a seductively adolescent manner—fa dia, as Shanghai lovers would say—before leading him into the store so that he can buy her the handbag? (Everything in China these days involves straightforward bartering, including personal relations, so he should be used to it.)
(b) Wait for him to suggest that he buy her something from the store, to insist that he treat her to something luxurious—but then steadfastly refuse to accept his generosity on the grounds that she is a principled, successful woman and does not need to be spoiled with gifts as if she were yet another of these pretty young concubines in search of a rich man to support her?
(c) Walk away from the store and out into the street, where, even in this part of town, there are provincial street merchants, men from Xinjiang and other remote parts of China, selling cherries spread out on pushcarts, hoping that the change of scenery will encourage him to show her some affection, for he has not yet done so and she is beginning to yearn for physical comfort?
Should he:
(a) Continue to stare impassively at the window displays, glad that their dazzle and artistry provide a talking point and distraction to his reticence, all the time wondering: What does she want from him; does she genuinely like him?
(b) Be warm but maintain a distance from her, confining his physical contact with her to the odd friendly pat on the shoulder or hand gestures that may be interpreted as platonic—until such time that he can be sure she is with him not only for the luxury lifestyle he can offer her?
(c) Accept that she is a high-maintenance woman who needs to be entertained in a particular way and just go along with her wishes, even if he is being taken for a ride, for she is strangely charming and amusing, while he is a man who has lost his youth and been lonely for a very long time? Yes, he has been on his own for too long. After all, everyone says that women in Shanghai are complicated and difficult to please: Everyone knows they are zuo.
19.
THERE CAN BE NO TURNING BACK
“WOOOHOOOO!” GARY SHOUTS INTO THE MICROPHONE. “YOU are so great today; thank you for comiiiing!” This kind of high-voltage showmanship comes so easily to him, he can turn it on whenever he wishes; it is almost as it was in the old days.
The old days. He talks about a period of his life just seven months ago as “the old days,” as if it were such a long time ago; but in a life such as his, time passes quickly, and China has a way of accelerating time for him, speeding up the aging process. Whenever he looks at himself in the mirror these days, he notices how much he has aged in the last few months. It is not simply the harsh Shanghai pollution or the late-night chats on the Internet or the diet of instant noodles that make him look haggard; it is that he is actually growing old very quickly. After years of being indifferent to the passage of time, he now finds he has so much to do in life and so little time to accomplish it. Every second he spends onstage is wasted time, he thinks.
A new week, a new shopping mall: The stages on which he performs nowadays are all tiny, always to mark the opening of the shopping precincts that spring up everywhere in the outskirts of Shanghai. When he grumbled about this to his agent recently, she pointed out, rightly, that at least he had work these days and that slowly his career might be rebuilt. All he had to do was carry on singing as before, do what he was good at, and things would fall back into place.
The problem is, he knows that this will not happen—his career will never again be as it was in the old days. He senses that his time is over. When he says, “Come on, sing along with me; I know you know the words!” no one joins in. In olden times, all he had to do was hold the microphone out, pointing it at the audience, and they would break into song. Whenever he said, “Raise your hands and clap,” thirty thousand hands would move in unison; it was as if he were a puppetmaster, capable of doing anything he wished. Now no one is interested, not even the tabloid newspapers, which can’t muster the energy to gloat over his performing in shopping malls. The tabloids were interested only in his fall, not his mediocrity. Only that which is sensational has a right to exist in the pages of modern life; there is no space for the ordinary.
But it doesn’t matter. He has decided that this life of his is over; he has to leave everything behind. He will continue doing these humiliating gigs in order to earn some money, but, with the encouragement of his Internet friend Phoebe, he has been writing his own songs with a view to recording an album. He does not know who will publish his music or distribute the CD—in the past, he never had to think about any of these tedious details; everything was done for him. But all this seems immaterial now, for as Phoebe keeps telling him, even if they have to sell self-made CDs off a pushcart on the corner of Nanjing Lu and Jiangning Lu or in a stall in Qipu Lu, they will do so. She will personally see to it that his music is a success!
This is the kind of moral support that Phoebe gives Gary every time he is feeling down. She makes him realize that, even without the fancy musicians and studio mixing equipment, he is still capable of creating beautiful music. She believes in him even though she has never heard any of his songs; her optimism is unshakable, and this, in turn, makes Gary feel invincible. He does not need all th
e backup singers and musicians he enjoyed before; the songs on his new album will consist of his voice over his own simple piano or guitar arrangements.
Of course, Phoebe is unaware of the change in his fortunes. She simply believes that he is a young musician who has no resources and is just starting out with his first-ever album. The other day, in a moment of fatigue, he said:
It’s never going to succeed. I can’t do this on my own—other people have drummers, bassists, keyboardists, co-writers, great producers. I’m all on my own.
But, little brother, one day you will have all that!
No, I will never have that.
Well, is that what you want, anyway? To become like all those idiot pop stars who make fools of themselves?
No, I guess I don’t.
Their careers just crash and disappear without a trace; no one really cares about them.
I know.
But you … when you are an old man, you will still be writing and singing great songs … and I will still be listening to them, ha-ha!
Ha-ha.
She really cheers him up when he is feeling depressed—which, these days, is far less often than before. She shares so much with him, gives so much of herself, that often he feels bad that he continues to hold back so much information. The other day, they were talking about the kinds of music they liked, the singers who had inspired them during bad times. They discovered a mutual affection for old Chinese love songs, which reminded them of the tunes their mothers used to sing to them and comforted them during periods of nostalgia and homesickness. Gary said he was fascinated by jazz, but Phoebe said she didn’t understand it. Later, she confessed that she liked pop music, even though she knew that a lot of the singers were not very nice people in private. But it didn’t matter, because some of their songs were uplifting and pleasant to listen to in the office at work when things were not going smoothly. She listed the people she liked: A-Mei, Chang Chen-Yue, Jolin Tsai, not Jay Chou, because he was too coarse; she preferred Wang Leehom, because he was a Quality Idol. And, okay, even though they were just pretty boys, some of the songs of Fahrenheit were not bad; the same went for Top Combine, and, actually, the last winner of the Super Voice Girl contest was not bad either. Finally, after a pause, Phoebe typed: